Posts Tagged ‘Square’

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Announcing the Facebook Antivirus Marketplace (Facebook Newsroom)
We’re announcing the Antivirus Marketplace, developed with industry partners to enhance protection for people on Facebook. AllFacebook The Antivirus Marketplace features free downloads and six-month licenses from Microsoft, McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos and Symantec. GeekWire The social network says its URL blacklist — which aims to stop its users from accessing malicious sites from Facebook — will also now incorporate the databases of those companies. The Next Web To access the new protection tools, all you have to do is visit the Facebook Security Page and select from the options listed on the page. Read more

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In Facebook Deal, Board Was All But Out of Picture (The Wall Street Journal)
On the morning of Sunday, April 8, Facebook Inc.’s youthful chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, alerted his board of directors that he intended to buy Instagram, the hot photo-sharing service. It was the first the board heard of what, later that day, would become Facebook’s largest acquisition ever, according to several people familiar with the matter. AllFacebook Zuckerberg negotiated with his Instagram counterpart down from an original $2 billion offer, asking Systrom whether he thought Facebook could one day be worth more than $200 billion, roughly the size of Google. Systrom agreed to the one percent or roughly $1 billion in stock. SocialTimes Normally a deal like this takes several days, if not weeks, to complete, and usually involves more lawyers and bankers than were present during the negotiations. Gizmodo It was a bold strategy, and one that smacks of the kind of approach a small start-up might take. It’s not, however, the way most people might expect a multi-million dollar public organization to conduct business. TechCrunch This just in: According to multiple sources close to the company, Facebook is eying an IPO on May 17th — depending on whether the SEC agrees that all the reams of paperwork (including those concerning its recent acquisition of Instagram) are in order. PRNewser The Ad Age Digital Conference continued Wednesday with a presentation from David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, whose presentation could be boiled down to this: “Your brand needs an always-on strategy.” Read more

Could this affect the quality of talent social media companies can hire later?

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PayPal has announced that it is well on track to process $3 billion in mobile payments this year. The current number is a 50% increase on its previous projections according to which PayPal anticipated to rack in $2 billion in mobile revenues in 2011. In fall of 2010, PayPal projected that it will generate $1.5 billion in mobile revenues in 2011, a figure that it soon had to revise upwards to $2 billion.

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Mobile apps for LinkedIn, Netflix, Foursquare and Square have been found to significantly lack in security precautions according to an evaluation conducted by ViaForensics. The evaluation revealed that apps for these services do not adequately store user passwords, which are kept by the apps without proper (rudimentary) encryption. This basic flaw in the apps has put the users of these apps at a risk of financial or identity theft.

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VeriFone, one of the oldest and largest providers of credit card processing systems, has just entered into a very public and very direct confrontation with Square, the new kid in town. In his open letter, VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron has termed Square’s credit card processing device “a skimming machine” that can be hacked by any reasonable programmer within one hour.

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Square, the startup that lets mobile vendors take credit card payments through their phones has taken a jab at competitors by dropping its $0.15 per transaction fee.

Now Square says it will charge a flat 2.75% of any transaction, regardless of size. The goal is to make payments easier for users and combat hidden fees commonly seen in the credit card industry, according to General Manager Keith Rabois.

“In the end accepting payments should be as easy as using a microwave,” Rabois told TechCrunch.

Competitors such as Intuit’s GoPayment system charge the flat 15 cent fee per transaction in addition to taking a percentage cut.

Payments via the internet have necessarily been growing less and less complicated, and more and more mobile. Shoppers can send and receive payments via PayPal on their phones, they can send money via Twitter, and a technology called Near Field Communication will let people zap money into the pockets of vendors by simply waving their mobile devices over a receiver.

Mobile credit card payment startup Square, whose card reading service works with a nifty magnetic card reader that plus into a mobile device’s headphone jack, is missing a very important piece: The patent for the hardware.

Square, Inc. and founder Jim McKelvey filed a complaint against Robert Morley, Jr., an associate professor of electrical engineering at Washington University, claiming that he neglected to list McKelvey as co-inventor of the device.

According to the story told McKelvey, a glass artist and entrepreneur, he came up with the idea for a mobile card reader in 2009 after losing a sale because he couldn’t accept credit card payments. He then teamed up with friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and they decided to use a mobile phone’s headphone jack as a way of interfacing with a card reading device. McKelvey then turned to friend Morley to help design the prototype hardware.

The three reportedly had discussed obtaining a patent once the prototype was finished, but Morley filed solo in June 2009, and a patent in his name for the card reader device was granted on October 12, 2010.   Read more